America Can’t Force Iran’s Surrender

It took a searing crisis for the
United States to officially acknowledge that it needs Iran’s help. On Monday,
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns reportedly discussed the jihadist
takeover of Iraq’s Sunni heartland with his Iranian counterparts on
the sidelines of nuclear talks in Vienna.

Good idea. For years, we’ve been calling on the United States to sit down
and discuss its mutual interests with Iran like adults, instead of shouting
across the Atlantic. Two of us  Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett, both
former career Middle East specialists for the U.S. government  have been
vilified in the American press for calling for pragmatic engagement. Now there’s
an opportunity to work together to face down a common threat, and even Republican
leaders like Lindsey Graham, the unfailingly hawkish South Carolina senator,
are starting to see things our way.

The United States should engage Iran not just as an unavoidably influential
player, however, but as an actor with its own concerns about terrorism  including
by jihadis involved in the U.S.-supported campaign against Bashar Assad’s
government in Syria. If the United States tries  as in past episodes of cooperation
with Tehran  to elicit Iranian help in Iraq without recognizing Iran’s wider
interests  dialogue will fail.

Likewise, Washington needs to deal with Tehran in a genuinely reciprocal
way on the nuclear issue. In the nuclear talks, America and its Western partners
have insisted on terms that would cut Iran’s uranium enrichment infrastructure
to token levels and freeze it there for 15-20 years. This will not just fail  it
will backfire against Western interests on multiple fronts. The West should
instead focus on crafting a deal recognizing Iran as an independent, truly
sovereign and rightfully rising power in its own region  as the United States
did with China 40 years ago.

Like the People’s Republic of China, the Islamic Republic of Iran was born
out of a revolution promising its people two things: to replace an externally
imposed autocracy with an indigenously created political order  for
Iran, one grounded in a model of participatory Islamist governance 
and to end the subordination of their country’s foreign policy to the dictates
of outside powers. In both cases, successive U.S. administrations rejected these
revolutionary projects and strove to undermine them.

In the Chinese case, Washington eventually realized that two decades of trying
to isolate, economically strangle and undermine the People’s Republic had
not just failed  it had backfired, weakening the U.S. position in Asia
and getting America involved in the draining quagmire of the Vietnam War.
America’s opening to China in the 1970s was fundamentally predicated on three
things: U.S. acceptance of the People’s Republic as an enduring political entity
representing legitimate national interests; a concomitant U.S. commitment to
stop trying to block China’s peaceful rise as an increasingly important player,
in Asia and globally; and U.S. acknowledgment that, although America would continue
to have important interests in Asia, the region would no longer be an exclusively
American sphere of influence.

On this last point, the most important sentence in the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué
 the document that served as the basic charter for realigning Sino-American
relations  declares, “neither [the United States nor China] should seek
hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and each is opposed to efforts by any
other country or group of countries to establish such hegemony.” Today, each
side is growing skeptical about the other’s ongoing adherence to this commitment.
But, for more than three decades, American acceptance of China’s peaceful
rise enabled the most extraordinary period of economic vitality and rising
prosperity in the history of the Pacific basin.

In the case of Iran, the Obama administration has finally understood that
America’s decades-long drive to determine Iran’s developmental trajectory
and strategic orientation has failed. But Washington has continued to insist
on the quintessentially hegemonic prerogative of micromanaging Iran’s nuclear
development. Washington insists on this not to control what Westerners perceive
as the proliferation risks of Iran’s nuclear activities  perceptions
more effectively and legitimately addressed through adequate monitoring and
verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)  but to
use Tehran’s anticipated acquiescence to American conditions for an “acceptable”
program to underscore that the Middle East remains a U.S. sphere of influence.

The United States has tried subordinating the strategic orientation of a
major Middle Eastern state before. Three and a half decades ago, the U.S.-brokered
Camp David accords reduced Egypt to a strategic and economic dependency of
the United States. While American foreign policy elites regularly extol the
regional “stability” wrought by Camp David, that stability was in fact dangerously
illusory.

In the wake of Camp David, Saudi Arabia made promotion of violent jihadism
an increasingly prominent tool in Saudi foreign policy  a trend that incubated
al Qaeda and is still spawning an ever-proliferating array of ideologically
similar threats to international security. Three decades of rule by a U.S.-puppet
regime, with accompanying political repression and economic stagnation, made
Egypt itself a prime source for jihadi ideologues (such as al Qaeda
leader Ayman Zawahiri) and fighters. And allowing the Israeli military to
consolidate nearly absolute freedom of unilateral initiative  one of Camp David’s
first fruits  has been deeply corrosive of America’s regional standing.

For the United States to try doing to Iran what it has done to Egypt would
be even more damaging. First of all, such a course would not be sustainable;
even in the unlikely event that some in the Iranian political establishment
supported it, other political elites and public opinion would block the requisite
consensus for such a radical change in Iranian strategy. More broadly, diminishing
Iranian power would leave America’s ostensible Middle Eastern allies even
less constrained in pursuing the most destructive aspects of their regional
agendas. (The jihadis’ advance in Iraq highlights just some of the risks this
could pose.) While Americans may not like hearing it, a truly stable balance
of power in the Middle East needs a strong and independent Iran, representing
the region’s only indigenously generated and relatively successful model of
participatory Islamist governance.

Globally, too, Iran’s strategic autonomy is a stabilizing factor. American
efforts to subordinate Iran into a pro-U.S. political and security order in
the Middle East will reinforce both the accelerating consolidation of a Sino-Russian
axis against what Beijing and Moscow see as America’s ongoing hegemonic ambition
as well as a growing convergence of Russian and Chinese interests with Iran’s.
As the world becomes more multipolar, Ayatollah Khomeini’s injunction, “neither
east nor west”  words literally carved in stone at the entrance to Iran’s Ministry
of Foreign Affairs  becomes ever more relevant to forging a genuinely stable
international order in the 21st century.

What would it mean for America and its Western partners to seek a deal recognizing
Iran as an independent, truly sovereign and rightfully rising power in its
own region? Above all, it would mean recognizing that Iranians themselves
will make decisions about their future energy and technology needs and how
best to meet them. The goal of a settlement should be to ensure that the theoretical
proliferation risks associated with Iran’s nuclear activities  which are no
greater or less than those associated with similar activities in numerous
other countries  are controlled through robust IAEA monitoring and verification.
The goal should not be to force Tehran’s surrender to Washington’s diktats;
that will backfire, leaving the United States, Iran and the post-Cold War
international order at a dangerous precipice.

Flynt Leverett is professor of international affairs at Pennsylvania State
University’s School of International Affairs. Hillary Mann Leverett teaches
U.S. foreign policy at American University and is CEO of STRATEGA, a political
risk consultancy. They are both retired national security professionals, Flynt
of the CIA, State Department and National Security Council; Hillary of the State
Department, National Security Council and U.S. mission to the United Nations.
They are co-authors of Going
to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic
of Iran. Visit their website.